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[Windows OS] Version 1604 - Windows 10 1903 now available

Posts

I few months back, after letting the PC run idle for at least about five minutes, my system fans start running faster and making more noise. When I shake the mouse, the go quiet until another five minute idle passes. I did some investigating and discovered that my CPU temps rise (after idle) by three to five degrees (never much more than ~30).

I never made any change to my fan profiles and other than a Steam game or similar, have installed nothing that wasn't an IS or other program update.

Any ideas about what would make the CPU run a bit hotter on idle and then dip back on a minor manual action?

I hadn't. I was hoping that it was a common enough issue. Turns out, it sort of is. After about ten or so minutes of idling, CPU usage would spike to 100% and the culprit was RuntimeBroker.exe which is a Win10 thing that manages app usage. Apparently it or an app breaks and it starts freaking out.

I used the tips here. I hadn't disabled all the tips about Windows, so I did. But that didn't do it. I had already turned off updates from more than one place. But it was disabling the background apps that did it. I didn't turn all of them off, and I don't remember which ones were on. All that is left on is Calculator, Settings, Weather, and Windows Security. (I'm pretty sure I never turned anything else off previously so it's from whatever is 'on' by default.)

After a reboot and sitting for thirty minutes there was no unusual spike in usage. Back to silent running! Huzzah!

I think a MS update (I'm sure it was from before the borked rollout) must have 'fixed' an app by breaking the fuck out of it somehow.

and I mean, just as a course of random usage a CPU being utilized every so often is not actually a bad thing. Windows is always doing approximately 234987328347234978 things. Sometimes that needs CPU for a minute.

Oh, sure. During my testing it would spike momentarily and then settle back to ~1%. But I'm not talking about that. It was 100% ALL THE TIME once RuntimeBroker started doing its thing. The only other things that I've ever been doing that did that was running Handbrake or something to convert media to Mp4.

Is there a way to force Windows to update the time automatically on boot? Time in Windows gets messed up every time I boot into it after being in Linux. It sorts itself out eventually but often not for quite a while after booting. Fixing it manually by toggling set time automatically on/off is annoying.

DDLLLLDL - Bottom in November
WWDWDWWWWDWWWWLDWWW - Premiers in April
WW - Champions in May

Is there a way to force Windows to update the time automatically on boot? Time in Windows gets messed up every time I boot into it after being in Linux. It sorts itself out eventually but often not for quite a while after booting. Fixing it manually by toggling set time automatically on/off is annoying.

Are you comfortable with setting up a task in Task Scheduler? I found a couple solutions. Seems like one key thing is to make the task only start if a network connection is available.

Is there a way to force Windows to update the time automatically on boot? Time in Windows gets messed up every time I boot into it after being in Linux. It sorts itself out eventually but often not for quite a while after booting. Fixing it manually by toggling set time automatically on/off is annoying.

Set your Linux install to use local time instead of UTC.
Not sure what you use, but on newer Ubuntu, the command is just "timedatectl set-local-rtc 1"

You can modify the Windows registry to use UTC, but it's not as reliable as changing the linux side.

SiliconStew on February 25

Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.

So this is very interesting. The last couple fast ring builds of windows have included unspecified "gaming improvments"

So some people have done some digging, and it looks like Microsoft is porting a lot of the native Xbox infrastructure directly into Windows 10. There's a lot of geekery around file formats and libraries and back end stuff, but boiled down the simplest form, it looks like Windows 10 might be able to, at some point, natively support Xbox One games.

so like, right now for games that have Xbox and Win10 versions, they're different binaries/files. In the simplest terms developers have to export a version of the game to work on both, which does add some complexity.

What Microsoft is testing is basically that the same file you download and play on your Xbox will work on PC. this could, in theory, mean every single Xbox One game could work on Windows.

Simple time means that we're not worried about preservation of Xbox One games for the same reason we're not worried about preservation of PS4 games. But you go back a generation or two, and then things get a lot harder for hardware and software.

That's what I'm really interested in. Plus, you know, you won't need quite the same horsepower to emulate Xbox 360 and original Xbox, almost certainly.

Simple time means that we're not worried about preservation of Xbox One games for the same reason we're not worried about preservation of PS4 games. But you go back a generation or two, and then things get a lot harder for hardware and software.

That's what I'm really interested in. Plus, you know, you won't need quite the same horsepower to emulate Xbox 360 and original Xbox, almost certainly.

I guess it depends on how much of the xbox one OS infrastructure they're porting to Windows 10. As of right now, the only datapoint we have is an Xbox One binary that Microsoft is testing with.

oXbox could/should be much easier to emulate/support than Xbox 360 since that console also ran X86. I'm not sure if they'll put the PowerPC emulator needed for the 360 games into Windows 10, but there's no reason they couldn't.

That sounds awesome, I have a 2017 surface pro as my main Windows PC and I use my Xbox via streaming to play games on it when the TV is otherwise occupied. I'm hoping to switch to a surface book 3 later this year and it would be great to just be able to play games on it.

There are a lot of fiddly details about PC gaming that PC ports get wrong. Things like detecting when the selected system audio device has changed (“whoops, I need to switch to my headset”), or when a controller has been turned on after the game has started. It’d be super cool if all that stuff just worked automatically by virtue of the developer having targeted a console (and the game having gone through the platform-holder approval process).

oXbox could/should be much easier to emulate/support than Xbox 360 since that console also ran X86. I'm not sure if they'll put the PowerPC emulator needed for the 360 games into Windows 10, but there's no reason they couldn't.

The Xbox CPU was x86 (it was basically a slightly beefed up Coppermine mobile Celeron) but the console itself a lot of custom hardware (mainly the GPU, but especially audio), and there is basically zero public documentation on how a lot of it works. I'd be excited if Microsoft brought original Xbox emulation to Windows, because without official support it will be a long time if ever before we see Xbox games running at native speeds without serious issues on a PC. It would be pretty great to see what the modding community would be able to do after sifting through the official release as well.

The Xbox library wasn't exactly stuffed with exclusives, but getting certain PC ports from the early 2000s running on Windows 10 can be a colossal pain in the ass, so if we had some decent emulation framework in the future it might just be easier to run the Xbox versions of popular cross platform games from that era on Windows instead of their native versions/other console emulators.

oXbox could/should be much easier to emulate/support than Xbox 360 since that console also ran X86. I'm not sure if they'll put the PowerPC emulator needed for the 360 games into Windows 10, but there's no reason they couldn't.

The Xbox CPU was x86 (it was basically a slightly beefed up Coppermine mobile Celeron) but the console itself a lot of custom hardware (mainly the GPU, but especially audio), and there is basically zero public documentation on how a lot of it works. I'd be excited if Microsoft brought original Xbox emulation to Windows, because without official support it will be a long time if ever before we see Xbox games running at native speeds without serious issues on a PC. It would be pretty great to see what the modding community would be able to do after sifting through the official release as well.

The Xbox library wasn't exactly stuffed with exclusives, but getting certain PC ports from the early 2000s running on Windows 10 can be a colossal pain in the ass, so if we had some decent emulation framework in the future it might just be easier to run the Xbox versions of popular cross platform games from that era on Windows instead of their native versions/other console emulators.

I mean, they've already made a number of oXbox games available on Xbox One so.......

MS got over half the Xbox library running on a machine with a PowerPC architecture (the 360), and a handful on the Xbone, of course. If they have the will, I think they could do it. It's likely to be tricky, and probably expensive, but they may already have the technical backbone in place.

I'd love to see it; the Xbox was my primary system of choice in that era, and as well as (I'd argue) a better catalogue of exclusives than it's usually given credit for, it tended to have the best versions of multiplatform games too; often the only console versions with native progressive scan and widescreen, sometimes with bump-mapping etc thrown in.

It seems fanciful, but then, I never thought they'd do it on the Xbox One. But they did. And Phil Spencer does seem to genuinely care about preserving at least some of the old Xbox legacy. Of course it could then get shoehorned into the next Xbox generation as well. It'll be interesting to see.

Starting with the 1903 update, Micirosoft will no longer force it immediately on users. When user checks for updates they will be promted to either install the monthly patch for their current version, or the new windows version. the new windows version will be optional until your current windows 10 version is going out of support, in which case it will then become mandatory and force an install.

users will also be able to defer the monthly patch for a week, five times. Meaning you can essentially skip a month of security patches if you so desire. After a month it will force you to take the patch.

This is a great compromise. It ensures everyone on Windows 10 remains up to date on security, and allows deferring version updates but still ensures everyone remains supported.

Also Windows 10 1903 will go out to release preview ring next week and not be deployed to the general public until May, to hopefully prevent the debacle that was 1809.

Man, I just wish that I was a non-business-user could get my hands on LTSB. I don't want Windows changing, I don't want it rebooting on Microsoft's schedule, I just want my environment setup and working and consistent while I take security patches and maybe every 2-3 years do a full reimage.

Instead of every 6 months having half my damned workflow break.

The days where dicking around with my computer was fun are long past, I just want it to work when I get home.

Man, I just wish that I was a non-business-user could get my hands on LTSB. I don't want Windows changing, I don't want it rebooting on Microsoft's schedule, I just want my environment setup and working and consistent while I take security patches and maybe every 2-3 years do a full reimage.

Instead of every 6 months having half my damned workflow break.

The days where dicking around with my computer was fun are long past, I just want it to work when I get home.